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New goodies!
I've been setting aside the new picture books as they've come in for the last month until I had a morning where I could sit down for an hour and read through them. There's wonderful new stuff in there! A nice mix of some silly, some good-for-early-literacy stuff to read to your babes and toddlers, and some terrific stories for slightly older kids.
I do love this part of my job... And sharing them with you! Hurry in and snap up a few of these - I promise you'll thank me later.
The last couple of weekends have found me unexpectedly auditioning for a play. For the past few years, I've been at home raising babies and feeling like I couldn't be away from the homestead long enough to attend rehearsals. I won't lie. It's been a hard adjustment for me. The kids are only young once, but it's quite a mind bend to simply abandon something that is so much a part of me. I also think that it's really important for moms to have time to themselves to rejuvenate, refresh, and come back to the kidlets a better, more patient, version of themselves. Anyways, I had the play all picked out. It's one that I've wanted to do ever since seeing the movie version, and it didn't start rehearsing until December 2008 - after I planned to be finished breastfeeding. Little did I know the auditions would be held so soon...
(This ain’t about chicken)
A few years ago, when I was still a control freak drama queen novice in the kitchen, one tiny little speed bump on my road to creating a meal would totally derail my cooking efforts.
Partly because of inexperience, partly because of frustration and partly out of indignation that I felt like preparing something and it wasn’t going perfectly, I would freak out at the slightest urm, challenge that came up while cooking. A recipe called for fresh rosemary, and I only had dried rosemary? Disaster! The sour cream I needed went bad sitting in the back of the fridge for a year? Chris! Out you go in the pouring rain to find sour cream at 10pm! The recipe clearly states that I should broil my chicken, and my stove’s broiler setting is not working? Forget it! I’m done! The whole thing’s going in the garbage!
Last week, a Quebec Superior Court Judge overruled a father's punishment for his daughter. After what the father claimed were repeated misuses of the internet, he finally made the decision to deny his permission for her to attend her year-end school trip. The child then left the home, choosing to live with her mother instead (the parents are divorced), who granted her request to take the trip. However, the school refused to allow her without both parents' consent, so the girl took her father to court.
Sometimes, ripping things up is fun. ESPECIALLY if you're caught inside during a summer downpour and nothing sounds fun to do anymore. (Yes, we're having those conversations already - and he won't be out of school until Friday!)
My son was tearing up newspaper into long thin strips and getting excited about paper-mache, (a good goopy/messy activity if there ever was one) and I thought…braids. What a neat texture doing paper-mache with braids would be!
(And it would. But it would take forever to dry.)
Oh how I love sun dress season.
Maybe I'm not a sexy, young Bohemian anymore but there's something about breezy, cotton sun dresses that make me long for the days when a tan, a loose bun and a yard or two of colorful fabric was all I needed to take me from an afternoon at the lake to an evening at the club.
Funky, colorful sun dresses are everywhere this year and after the winter we just endured, we deserve a trip down memory lane.
I've already snapped up three (including the one at left for 24.99 at Urban Planet) and as much as I'm enjoying them I've realized that nothing is quite the same the second (or 20th) time around.
Let me tell you what I've learned...
OK, so, like, I don't want to be a traitor to my chosen profession or anything, but there are some things about performing that I just don't get. Like why almost any guy I know finds The Three Stooges to be most hilarious thing EVER. Or how movies like Little Man ever got the green light. Or who ever thought that William Shatner could act. But these things have nothing on the issue that I have with mascots, or, basically any person dressed up in a cartoon character or animal costume where you can't see their face.
Yeah, I'm a freak. But I've felt this way for a long time. I don't exactly know what precipitated these harsh feelings, but it doesn't seem to be something that I'm going to get over anytime soon. So, I thought I would try out a little self-analysis to get to the bottom of it..
Continue reading "Long-haired freaky people need not apply.." »
So, I took the girls to the grocery store today, (Yes, I take them both grocery shopping. It always takes two hours, everybody poops, and it seems I always spend $125, regardless of what I buy.) and as I was standing in the checkout line, I started to read the Enquirer eat my daughter’s goldfish crackers take inventory of the groceries that the man in front of me was buying. He didn’t have a lot on the belt, but it was all pretty disappointing.
I started to mentally audit his purchases, and for each over-packaged, under-performing food he had chosen, I came up with a more nutritious, less processed option that would probably have netted out evenly in terms of cost with the items he was taking home. I absolutely loved the little game I was playing, as well as the opportunity to put my best skills – knowing better, feeling superior and understanding the healthy food/healthy body connection – to good use...
Baby made? Check. House bought? Check. (Well, in 25 years or so it'll be ours.) Deck and fence finally built? Check. (Though Addictine is getting a bit naggy about the finishing touches.) Grass? Well, we had some until the dirt from the deck and the fence build killed it all. And if we did still have some, who would have time to maintain it?
So when I saw a review of Eco-Lawn in House & Home, I was intrigued. Water-sucking, fertilizer and pesticide-needing earth covers, lawns are typically viewed as anything but "green".
